Enclosing the Spirit

ByPeter Read

Wasta Est, the land is laid waste. The phrase is common in the Domesday
Book describing the vacant fi elds and empty villages of England following the Norman conquest. Encroachment by the sea, by the plague. and
by environmental change put an end to hundreds more English villages
by 1400. But the greatest depopulator of English and Scottish villages
was the phenomenon known as enclosure, by which hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land were turned to pasture by their
owners.